Gerhard Wisnewski

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Gerhard Wisnewski (born November 30, 1959 in Krumbach (Swabia) ) is a German book and film author who spreads conspiracy theories in his publications .

Wisnewski became known in the early 1990s as a freelance WDR employee with his theses that behind the RAF phantom there was a conspiracy of the secret services , and sometimes taken seriously. That changed after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 , about which he spread widespread speculation . Today he explains in his publications as a freelance author a wide variety of events with extensive conspiracies by governments, secret services and the media worldwide and is increasingly appearing in right-wing populist media.

Life

Wisnewski was already active as a journalist during his school days in Frankfurt am Main . After graduating from high school in 1979, he worked for the Frankfurter Neue Presse and Bild Frankfurt. 1981 to 1990 he studied political science in Munich . He also worked for various Munich newspapers ( AZ , tz , Münchner Stadtzeitung ) and magazines ( Stern München, PM Magazin ).

Wisnewski has been working as a book and film author since 1986. He was the author of the film "Aktenzeichen 11. 9. Unselöst", which was broadcast on June 20, 2003 on WDR . Tobias Jaecker assigned the film, which “does not even begin to” allow an “alternative interpretation” to the “most popular conspiracy theoretic assertions” presented there on September 11, 2001, to the anti-American discourse . In September 2003, Der Spiegel proved to Wisnewski that he had manipulated a statement by interview partner Ernie Stull in this film and the book on which it was based. WDR then terminated their collaboration with Wisnewski and his co-author Willy Brunner. Since then, Wisnewski has published outside of the established media. According to the Americanist Michael Butter , Wisnewski uses his cultural capital as a “defector” from the “mainstream media” in order to be able to accuse them of censorship and manipulation in a particularly effective manner.

Wisnewski frequently publishes with Kopp Verlag and is an exclusive contributor to Kopp magazine ; Spiegel Online writes that Wisnewski has with his conspiracy theories on the publisher's website “a very special explanation for pretty much every event in contemporary history” - and thus contributes to the publisher's “mixture of right-wing populism, criticism of capitalism and taboo-breaking attitude”. He also writes for Jürgen Elsässer's right-wing populist magazine Compact . The journalist Hans Rauscher calls Wisnewski in the standard a “high-performance conspiracy theorist” who also uses communication via the Internet via YouTube videos as a “popular vehicle” for this purpose. According to Jürgen P. Lang , Wisnewski appears as a "star" at events organized by the magazine Compact , which are mainly attended by those who have lost out on modernization , and portrays himself and his audience as victims of an overpowering alliance of politics and media that dominates the public and is controlled by Western governments - sought to "enslave the rest of humanity". He speaks regularly at the “Alternative Knowledge Congress”, which is organized by politicians from the right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany and where other people such as Eva Herman or Michael Friedrich Vogt appear with conspiracy theoretic theses.

When the operator of the Islamist website Muslim-Markt , Yavuz Özoguz , organized a trip to Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad in 2012 , in which Jürgen Elsässer and Wisnewski also took part alongside Özoguz , the visit was highlighted in view of Ahmadinejad's denial of the Holocaust and Israel's right to exist sharply criticized as legitimizing the Iranian regime. In June 2018 Wisnewski won a trial before the Higher Regional Court of Cologne , the Richard Gutjahr , because of a passage in the book concealed - covered up - Lost against him had initiated because "the representation Wisnewski's far too vague", was "to find out about all the suspicions reporting to qualify ".

plant

Wisnewski became known for his books on conspiracy theory about the Red Army Faction , the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and the moon landing . In these books he suggests the interpretation that the RAF attacks from 1985 to 1991 were not carried out by the RAF , the attacks of September 11, 2001 were not planned by al-Qaeda, and there was no manned moon landing in 1969 . The media scientist Christian de Simoni speaks in this context of "interpretations offered by esoteric paranoiacs", to which Wisnewski belongs. Jörg Lau wrote in 2003 that Wisnewski was an example of what has become the most successful conspiracy theorist; he located it among the "past spontaneous and anarchos and marginal figures of the red-green milieu who dominate the scene" instead of the previously dominant "type of uptight, authority-fixated nutcase".

In his book Classified Terror. Who rules the world with fear from 2007, Wisnewski speculates that all major terrorist attacks of recent times, including the attacks on religious groups in Iraq, could be traced back to conspiracies by governments and secret services beyond official statements (see false flag ), especially a secret one US government plan for world domination. Wisnewski has repeatedly applied this hypothesis to current events, for example after the attack on Charlie Hebdo in 2015 with a comment on Kopp Online and the book The Truth about the Assassination attempt on Charlie Hebdo - Founding Act of a Totalitarian Europe . Wisnewski also doubts the acts or the existence of the right-wing extremist terrorist cell, the National Socialist Underground , which Der Freitag describes as the thesis of an “NSU phantom” and places it in the context of similar statements from right-wing populist to right-wing extremist media.

In the case of the Austrian politician Jörg Haider , who died in a car accident in October 2008 , Wisnewski speculates about the possibilities of a planned attack. According to the historian Claus Oberhauser, he “proceeds according to the theory of conspiracies” and “gets lost in ludicrous thoughts”, which Hellwig Valentin “bizarre conjectures” is called.

Since 2008 Wisnewski has published annual reviews under the title Hidden - Covered Up - Forget , in which he tries to explain the events of the past year with "untenable" conspiracy theories. For example, he attributed the 2009 L'Aquila earthquake to the fact that the particle research center CERN “probably shot neutrino rays ” at L'Aquila. Spiegel Online calls the book series a " Vademecum for conspiracy theorists" because of its wide distribution . The reviews were published by Knaur-Verlag until 2015 and reached number one on the non-fiction bestseller list in Germany from 2013 to 2015. Before the 2016 yearbook was published, Knaur separated from Wisnewski, after his account of comments on the refugee crisis ; since then the series has been published by Kopp-Verlag . Denis Scheck described the 2017 yearbook as the “house book of conspiracy theorists” and commented that it was a “ mind-boggling collection of ' alternative facts '” against “a last bit of reason in public discourse”. Alex Rühle wrote about the 2018 yearbook that the “bad thing” about it was “neither the clumsiness of his argumentation nor the craftsmanship of amateurism; neither the helpless language in which all of this is thrown together, nor the pseudo-logical arguments by which seriousness and causality are to be faked. The bad thing is that this book is sold thousands of times. ”All of this points to the“ epistemic crisis in the western world ”, that the common foundation of factual knowledge is increasingly being eroded.

Because of Wisnewski's statements in the refugee crisis, the Rottenburg SPD city ​​association - supported by politicians from other parties - unsuccessfully demanded the Kopp publishing house to distance itself in September 2015. Wisnewski had proclaimed the "wave of refugees" to be a " defense case " at Kopp Online and described refugees as a "weapon" and German politicians as "remote controlled zombies" and at the same time as "masterminds" of the crisis that was "artificially created". The Mayor of Rottenburg, Stephan Neher, called Wisnewski's statements “hair-raising”, “terrifying” and poorly researched, while the journalist Peter Nowak wrote that, with such statements, Wisnewski, like Udo Ulfkotte or Jürgen Elsässer, was one of those authors who were “right-wing, misanthropic and xenophobic Scoring the spectrum ”.

Books (selection)

Films (selection)

  • 1992: The destruction of the RAF legend , ARD focus
  • 1994: A man to shadow - private detectives in Germany , ZDF
  • 1999: There are no skid marks in the sky - How air accidents are cleared up , WDR
  • 2001: Mosaic of Death - How disaster victims are identified , ARD
  • 2002: The Apollo Files - On the Trail of the Moon Landing , WDR
  • 2003: file number 11.9. unsolved , WDR

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.wisnewski.ch/biografie/
  2. ↑ Tobias Jaecker: Hatred, envy, delusion. Anti-Americanism in the German media. Campus, Frankfurt, New York 2014, p. 44 f.
  3. ↑ Dominik Cziesche, Jürgen Dahlkamp , Ulrich Fichtner, Ulrich Jaeger, Gunther Latsch, Gisela Leske, Max F. Ruppert: Panoptikum des Absurden . In: Der Spiegel . No. 37 , 2003 ( online ).
  4. ↑ The Big Mumpitz , taz.de, September 11, 2003
  5. ^ Andreas Anton : Conspiracy Theories for September 11th. In: Andreas Anton, Michael Schetsche, Michael K. Walter (Eds.): Konspiration. Sociology of Conspiracy Thinking. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2014, pp. 157–179, here p. 165 .
  6. ↑ Michael Butter: "Nothing is what it seems". About conspiracy theories. Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-518-07360-5 , p. 67.
  7. ↑ Stefan Kaiser: Conspiracy theories: The business with fear. In: Spiegel Online , May 22, 2014. The article has been reprinted in Christian Rickens (Ed.): Das Leuchtbirnenkomplott. The most spectacular conspiracy theories - and what's true about them. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2014, chapter "The business with fear: How the Kopp-Verlag turned conspiracy theories into a business model", pp. 165–170.
  8. ↑ a b Marc Brost, Daniel Erk, Tina Hildebrandt : Conspiracy theories: The very own madness. In: Die Zeit , August 8, 2015.
  9. ^ A b Hans Rauscher : The great war of opinion on the Internet. In: Der Standard , March 9, 2015.
  10. ↑ Jürgen P. Lang: Conspirators among themselves: True fairy tales. In: BR.de , April 23, 2016.
  11. ↑ Konrad Fischer: AfD: cash in with the right-wing populists. From the children's room to the publishing house. In: Wirtschaftswoche , March 11, 2016.
  12. ↑ Ulrike Märkel: "Knowledge Congress" by AfD functionaries: something for all conspiracy fans. In: Die Tageszeitung , November 11, 2015.
  13. ^ Jonas Nonnenmann: FDP state parliament candidate advertises Ahmadinejad. In: Berliner Zeitung , May 4, 2012.
  14. ↑ Stefan Niggemeier : Conspiracy theory with consequences: A victory for insubstantial whispers: Gutjahr is subject to Wisnewski , uebermedien.de, July 30, 2018
  15. ^ Nicole Stöckert: Paperback bestseller: Vademecum for conspiracy theorists. In: Spiegel Online , January 16, 2012; Edwin Baumgartner: World Conspiracy Theater. In: Wiener Zeitung , May 6, 2014.
  16. ^ Eckhard Jesse : Democracy in Germany. Diagnoses and analyzes. Edited by Uwe Backes and Alexander Gallus . Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2008, ISBN 978-3-412-20157-9 , p. 418 : “bizarre conspiracy theories”, “completely implausible assertion”.
  17. ^ Christian de Simoni: Gestures of concern in political, journalistic and literary responses to 9/11. In: Sandra Poppe, Thorsten Schüller, Sascha Seiler (eds.): 9/11 as a cultural turning point: Representations of September 11, 2001 in cultural discourses, literature and visual media. Transcript, Bielefeld 2009, pp. 81-99, here pp. 87 f.
  18. ↑ Jörg Lau: One delusion supports the other: Why the left first succumbs to the conspiracy theories on September 11th. In: Die Zeit , September 11, 2003.
  19. ^ Andrei S. Markovits , Lars Rensmann : Anti-Americanism in Germany. In: Brendon O'Connor (ed.): Anti-Americanism. History, causes, themes. Vol. 3: Comparative Perspectives. Greenwood World Publishing, Oxford 2007, ISBN 978-1-84645-026-6 , pp. 155–182, here p. 337, end note 66. See also Johannes Pennekamp , Patrick Bernau : Business with conspiracy theories: The fear industry. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , January 17, 2015, which show that Wisnewski links his USA thesis with the “ clash of cultures ”.
  20. ^ Nils Markwardt: Die Volksverhetzer. In: Friday , June 21, 2013.
  21. ↑ Claus Oberhauser: Conspiracy theories, power and society. In: Journal of International Masonic Research. Vol. 25, 2011 (preprint) .
  22. ↑ Hellwig Valentin: "Where one wrote the border with blood ...". Carinthia as part of the Alps-Adriatic region. In: Helmut Konrad , Stefan Benedik (Hrsg.): Exemplary research fields from 25 years of contemporary history at the University of Graz (= Mapping Contemporary History. Vol. 2). Böhlau, Vienna, Cologne, Weimar 2010, pp. 109–120, here p. 114 .
  23. ↑ Edwin Baumgartner: World Conspiracy Theater. In: Wiener Zeitung , May 6, 2014.
  24. ^ Nicole Stöckert: Paperback bestseller: Vademecum for conspiracy theorists. In: Spiegel Online , January 16, 2012.
  25. ↑ Bernd Harder : Knaur separates from Gerhard Wisnewski. Kopp takes him on, but has marketing problems. In: Blog. GWUP .net , January 14, 2016; Gerhard Wisnewski remains on the bestseller course after switching publisher: spurned, postponed, out of stock. In: Buchreport , February 12, 2016.
  26. ↑ Denis Scheck comments on the top ten non-fiction books. In: Das Erste , February 27, 2017.
  27. ↑ Alex Rühle: Conspiracy theories threaten democracy. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , January 27, 2018, p. 15
  28. ^ Florian Ganswind: Rottenburg: SPD protests against Kopp-Verlag. In: Schwarzwälder Bote , September 3, 2015.
  29. ↑ Kopp does not give in: The SPD's request remind him of dictatorship. In: Schwäbisches Tagblatt , September 3, 2015.
  30. ↑ Peter Nowak: On the Defense Case and the Refugees as Bombs. In: Telepolis , September 18, 2015.
personal data
SURNAME Wisnewski, Gerhard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer and film author
DATE OF BIRTH November 30, 1959
PLACE OF BIRTH Krumbach (Swabia)